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New Study Confirms a Negative Correlation Between Intelligence and Religiosity
New Study Confirms a Negative Correlation Between Intelligence and Religiosity
Q. Why are so few scientists religious and why do so many fundamentalists have no understanding of science and poor critical thinking skills?
A. Because learning science and thinking are hard, but religion is easy and requires no analytical skill.
In 2013 a team led by Professor of psychology at Rochester University, Miron Zuckerman, reported finding a negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity from a meta-analysis of 63 studies.
In 2019, with more studies being conducted and because his findings have been challenges, Zuckerman and colleagues repeated the meta-analysis with a larger data set of studies. This larger study has confirmed the earlier finding. showing the correlation between intelligence and religiosity is between -0.20 and -0.23. The correlation tends to be stronger in
For non-statisticians, what is a meta-analysis?
A meta-analysis is a statistical method used to combine and analyze the results of multiple independent studies on a particular research question or topic. It involves systematically reviewing and selecting relevant studies, extracting data from those studies, and then using statistical techniques to synthesize the data into a single quantitative estimate or effect size.The new study found evidence that an analytic (as opposed to intuitive) thinking style was related to both increased intelligence and reduced religiosity. There was no evidence that this correlation is changing over time.
Meta-analysis is often used in scientific research to address questions where multiple studies have been conducted on the same topic, but individual studies may have produced conflicting or inconclusive results. By combining the results of multiple studies, meta-analysis can provide a more robust and precise estimate of the true effect size of a particular intervention or relationship.
Meta-analyses are typically conducted using a pre-defined set of criteria for selecting studies, and a set of statistical procedures for combining and analyzing the data. The results of a meta-analysis can be presented in various ways, including as a summary effect size estimate with confidence intervals, as a forest plot that shows the results of individual studies along with the combined estimate, or as a subgroup analysis that examines whether the effect size varies across different subgroups of studies.
Meta-analysis has become increasingly popular in many fields of research, including psychology, medicine, and education, as a way to synthesize and integrate research findings and to draw more reliable and generalizable conclusions from multiple studies.
References:
- Borenstein, M., Hedges, L. V., Higgins, J. P. T., & Rothstein, H. R. (2011). Introduction to meta-analysis. John Wiley & Sons.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to meta-analysis, including step-by-step guidance on how to conduct a meta-analysis and interpret the results.- Cooper, H., Hedges, L. V., & Valentine, J. C. (Eds.). (2019). The handbook of research synthesis and meta-analysis (2nd ed.). Russell Sage Foundation.
This handbook is a comprehensive reference for conducting and reporting meta-analyses across various fields of research.- Sutton, A. J., Abrams, K. R., Jones, D. R., Sheldon, T. A., & Song, F. (2009). Methods for meta-analysis in medical research. John Wiley & Sons.
This book provides a detailed overview of the methods and techniques used in meta-analysis in the context of medical research.- Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package. Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1-48.
This article provides guidance on how to conduct meta-analyses using the R statistical programming language and the metafor package.
What is a meta-analysis?
Professor Zuckerman told the online psychology magazine, PsyPost:
The team's findings were published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, sadly behind a paywall. However, their abstract is freely available.Religiosity is a pervasive phenomenon. Its influence can be felt in all spheres of life. However, a sizeable portion of the population defines itself as atheist. Why do some people decide not to be religious? I thought it was an important and fascinating question.
Collecting new data to ascertain the validity of previous findings is crucial for science anytime, but especially when the subject matter is socially relevant and emotionally fraught.
The evidence that there is a negative relation between intelligence and religiosity is very strong. But the effect size of the relation is small. This means that there are factors besides intelligence that explain why people are or are not religious. It also means that although more intelligent people tend to be less religious on the average, predicting religiosity from intelligence for individuals is fallible.
Although we present reasons for the negative relation, the empirical evidence for these explanations is not definitive.
The negative relation was established for western societies. We don’t know whether it generalizes to other populations, particularly those in the Far East.
AbstractAlthough the correlation is strong, a correlation of between -0.20 and -0.23 suggests there is more behind religiosity than intelligence and critical thinking skills alone. Social and peer pressures and cultural imperatives such as the assumption that not being religious is somehow 'wrong' or even unpatriotic/anti-social are likely to be factors. A display of religiosity, whether genuine or not, is believed in some cultures to indicate trustworthiness - hence the large followings of American televangelists, so religion can provide excuses for people who need excuses, especially when their target marks lack critical thinking skills.
Zuckerman et al. (2013) conducted a meta-analysis of 63 studies that showed a negative intelligence–religiosity relation (IRR). As more studies have become available and because some of Zuckerman et al.’s (2013) conclusions have been challenged, we conducted a new meta-analysis with an updated data set of 83 studies. Confirming previous conclusions, the new analysis showed that the correlation between intelligence and religious beliefs in college and noncollege samples ranged from −.20 to −.23. There was no support for mediation of the IRR by education but there was support for partial mediation by analytic cognitive style. Thus, one possible interpretation for the IRR is that intelligent people are more likely to use analytic style (i.e., approach problems more rationally). An alternative (and less interesting) reason for the mediation is that tests of both intelligence and analytic style assess cognitive ability. Additional empirical and theoretical work is needed to resolve this issue.
Zuckerman, M., Li, C., Lin, S., & Hall, J. A. (2020).
The Negative Intelligence–Religiosity Relation: New and Confirming Evidence.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(6), 856–868. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219879122
© 2019 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This, of course, will vary greatly between cultures. In the UK, for example, where religion has been in free-fall since the mid-twentieth century, religiosity is more likely to be regarded as a mental illness than an indicator of trustworthiness, and many people would be reluctant to leave their children in the care of a priest, so religiosity tends to play little or no part in political debate. In the UK, politicians "don't do God".
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